1952
1951 1952 1953 Events * Pierre Boulle publishes The Bridge on the River Kwai. * Kenji Mizoguchi releases The Life of Oharu. Wins Venice Film Festival Prize. * Camille Chamoun becomes first President of Lebanon after a corruption scandal forces his predecessor to resign. * Future revolutionary icon Che Guevara takes 4,000-mile motorcycle trip alone through northern Argentina. * Federal Republic of Germany signs the Luxembourg Reparations Agreement, agreeing to pay Israel 3 billion Deutschmarks ($715 million) and 4.5 million to Jewish organizations represented by the Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). * China's population is 574.82 million. * Last sighting of a individual of the once abundant Caribbean Monk Seal. Timeline January * January 24: Vincent Massey becomes first Canadian Governor-General of Canada. February * February 13: Alfred Einstein dies at age 71. March * March 4: North Korea accused the U.N. of biological warfare. * March 7: Batista signs on for the Cold War as the U.S. and Cuba sign a military aid agreement. * March 29: U.S. President Harry S. Truman decides not to run for re-election. April * April 10: Grigorii Alekseevich Yavlinskii is born in Lviv. * April 11: Taiwan/Republic of China seizes Nanri Island from the Peoples' Republic of China. May * May 1: Bloody May Day. March from the Meiji Shrine to Hibiya Park in Tokyo organized by Zengakuren or National Federatio0n of Student Self-Government Association skips the park and surges into Imperial Palace Plaza chanting that the plaza belonged to the people. Clash with riot police results in one death and manmy injuries. June * June 6: Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn is born to the sound of the "God Bless America." * June 10: U.S. President Harry S. Truman orders nationalization of the steel industry. Big Business proves more powerful than the White House. * June 15: France supports the royal coup d'etat of Norodom Sihanouk overthrowing parliamentary democracy in Cambodia. French armored cars an Moroccan infantrymen do the trick. July * July 30: Future PRI presidential candidate Robert Medrazo is born in Villahermosa, Tabasco. August * August: Women's Home Companion does NOT publish Roald Dahl's "The Great Vanishing Trick," which it had commissioned. * August 13: Japan joins IMF. * August 14: Federal Republic of Germany joins IMF. * August 30: Finland pays its last war reparations to the Soviet Union. October * October: New York Yankees win the World Series. * October 2: Britain conducts nuclear test off the western shore of the Australian island of Trimouille (Monte Bello Islands). * Ovtober 7: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is born in Leningrad. * October 10: ''The New York Times reports the existence of "'Technischer Dienst'', a former Nazi dominated "stay-behind" network that had been established by the U.S. military for activiation in the event of a Soviet Red Army occupation. The group had drawn up blacklists of leftists to be eliminated or "liquidized." * October 22: Conservative British Prime Minister Winston Churchill crows about the British success in testing a nuclear weapon, in Australia. Speaking in the British House of Commons he says the test was done "to investigate the effects of an atomic explosion in a harbour." The real reason for British nuclear proliferation generally and for this explosion was for Britain to re-claim a position as a great power. * October 29: Der Speigel reports that anti-communist "stay-behind" networks exist all over Western Europe. Other Western news media sources ignore this. November * November 1: Operation Ivy; United States detonates the 1st thermonuclear device (H-bomb/fusion bomb) codenamed "Mike" on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands with a yield of 10.4 megatons. * November 4: Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected the 34th U.S. President, defeating liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson. The Cold War becomes a permanent fixture of American life from which it has never recovered. * November 4: John F. Kennedy is elected Senator from Massachusetts. He is re-elected to the office in 1958. December * December 5-8: London smog from coal smoke kills 4,703.